A noise-aware combination of dual-frequency measurements from GPS radio occultation

Customarily, the conventional linear combination (CLC) is used to extract neutral atmospheric components from dual-frequency (L1 and L2) RO data. The CLC combines and magnifies measurement noises, and thus works well only for those measurements of low noise.

Although the L1 data are of considerably higher quality than the L2 data, the CLC does not take this into account and treats both equally; this makes the CLC-produced data less attractive. The authors propose a new approach, named Noise-Aware Combination (NAC), which is a generalized combination that factors in the presence of measurement noise. In this NAC method, the L1 and L2 data are each regarded independently, with each contributing to the combination according to its dynamically assessed accuracy.